The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Enterprise resource planning (or ERP) is a phrase used to describe a broad set of activities supported by multi-module application software that helps a manufacturer or other business manage the important parts of its business, including product planning, parts purchasing, maintaining inventories, order tracking, interacting with suppliers, providing customer service, finance, human resources, etc. An example of an ERP system is Microsoft® Business Solutions-Axapta®. Axapta provides functionality to support many needs of a business, for example including: manufacturing; distribution, supply chain management, project management, financial management, human resource management, business analysis, enterprise portal, commerce gateway, etc.
Frequently, in business applications such as ERP systems, complicated data schema are used to store the application metadata. The metadata could include, for example, tables and fields containing information relating to customer sales orders, information relating to inventory, etc. Separate business intelligence metadata, in the form of a “semantic model” is also created. The semantic model contains data such as information concerning the relationships between the stored application metadata, information about how the stored application metadata is analyzed (e.g., does it make sense to aggregate the application metadata by rolling up many transactions all related to the same customer, does it make sense to group on certain types of fields like phone number, etc.), and information about how to navigate the data. Other information can also be stored in the semantic model. The semantic model in effect places a layer on top of the business application metadata so that it can be properly understood, navigated, analyzed, etc. For example, it wouldn't be beneficial to aggregate on phone numbers when doing an analysis of business application metadata, so a semantic model might include some knowledge or information to indicate that fact. Semantic models also refer to items using “friendly names” rather than by their possibly cryptic and/or hard to understand real names.
Typically, in business applications, the creation of business intelligence metadata is accomplished “after the fact”, frequently involving a completely different infrastructure. That is, after the business application database has been designed, a separate effort is undertaken to create an additional set of metadata that describes a “user friendly” business model on that same schema. Often times this semantic model is created by one or more persons other than the developers of the business application, thus potentially losing the benefit of the expertise of the developer(s) in the particular business area. It is this latter “semantic model” that users interact with when performing business intelligence scenarios: performing ad-hoc queries against the data stored in the relational database, or conducting analysis against an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) database that has been created for that purpose.